Stephen Kim pleads guilty in Fox News leak case

A State Department contractor charged with leaking top-secret information about North Korea to Fox News entered a guilty plea Friday and agreed to serve a 13-month prison term.

During an 80-minute hearing at U.S. District Court, Stephen Kim pleaded guilty to a single felony count of disclosing national defense information to an unauthorized person, Fox News reporter James Rosen.

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Kim admitted providing Rosen with the contents of a top-secret intelligence report on North Korean intentions to carry out nuclear tests. The contractor acknowledged that he and Rosen stepped out of their offices at State Department headquarters for a short meeting nearby on the morning of June 11, 2009.

Within a couple of hours, Rosen published a story on the Fox News website reporting that U.S. intelligence had concluded “through sources in North Korea” that the secretive communist nation planned to carry out four nuclear tests in response to an expected U.N. resolution. The resolution passed the next day, but no such tests took place.

After prosecutor Michael Harvey laid out the facts at Friday’s session, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly led Kim through them a bit at a time.

Near the end of the hearing, Kollar-Kotelly asked Kim how he pled to the count of unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

“I plead guilty,” Kim said calmly.

A small number of Kim’s friends looked on from the gallery during the plea hearing.

“Faced with the draconian penalties of the Espionage Act, the tremendous resources that the federal government devoted to his case (a half-dozen prosecutors and a dozen FBI agents), and the prospect of a lengthy trial in today’s highly-charged climate of mass disclosures, Stephen decided to take responsibility for his actions and move forward with his life,” Lowell said in a statement e-mailed to reporters.

”It was the State versus a single individual, an uphill struggle to begin with. He took it on and did the best he could. Now we decide to stop,” Kim’s sister Yuri Lustenberger-Kim added in a statement on behalf of Kim’s family.

Under the terms of a plea bargain with prosecutors, the North Korea security expert agreed to a 13-month prison sentence, and to spend a year on supervised release. No fine would be imposed under the plea deal.

The proposed 13-month term is a modest one compared to the ten-year maximum a judge could have imposed on the charge to which Kim pled guilty, although judges usually sentence defendants in accordance with sentencing guidelines that tend to call for sentences well below the maximum.

Under the plea deal, prosecutors agreed to drop a false statements charge that allowed for a potential five additional years behind bars.

The terms of the deal suggest the government was eager to avoid a trial in the case. In addition to eliminating the possibility of an acquittal, a guilty plea also rules out the possibility that additional classified information could be disclosed at trial and eliminates the need for government officials to testify.

Kim’s lawyers had aggressively pursued discovery in the case, demanding records about the access various high-ranking current and former government officials had to the top-secret intelligence report. Recent court filings mentioned current White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, former National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, and Assistant Secretary of State Danny Russel.

The defense could have sought to call one or more of those officials as witnesses to testify about handling of the intelligence report.

Lowell complained Friday that Kim was being pursued criminally while leaks from more senior officials never trigger such prosecution.

“Our system for prosecuting ‘leaks’ in this country is broken and terribly unfair. Lower-level employees like Mr. Kim are prosecuted because they are easier targets or often lack the resources or political connections to fight back. High-level employees leak classified information to forward their agenda or to make an administration look good with impunity,” the defense attorney said.